Great Pumpkin Beer Festival – Tickets on sale now

Tickets are now on sale for the Great Pumpkin Beer Festival 2011. This year the 7th annual celebration of pumpkin beers organized by Elysian Brewing Company happens on Saturday, October 8th and Sunday, October 9th at the new Elysian production brewery in Georgetown. Organizers moved the event from the Elysian Capitol Hill brewpub to the larger Georgetown location to accommodate the growing hordes of pumpkin beer lovers.

The festival will feature more than 40 beers from breweries near and far. We list them below. The Great Pumpkin Beer Festival (GPBF) is like a normal beer festival except that all of the beers are pumpkin-themed, pumpkin-brewed, and pumpkin-inspired. Perhaps the highlight of the festival is the daily tapping of the Great Pumpkin, which happens each day at 4:00.

Trays of delicious pumpkin beer.

The Great Pumpkin

Elysian takes a couple of 200 pound pumpkins and carefully hollows them out. They scorch the insides, fill them with still-fermenting beer, and then seal the pumpkins back up using hot wax. They sit. The beer ferments. This is a pumpkin version of a cask-conditioned ale. The beer undergoes its final fermentation in the pumpkin. The Great Pumpkin is tapped with a spigot and mallet and the beer pours freely until it is gone.